


We Crash and Burn Together

by Write_like_an_American



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: (Kraglin is 17), Alien Biology, Canonical Child Abuse, Eventual Smut, First Time, Loss of Virginity, Love Triangles, Love Triangles to Polyamory, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Problematic Themes, Ravager-typical violence, Stakar's Sex Ed Class, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Virginity, eventual polyamory, pre-gotg fic, slaves who don't save themselves, slaves who need help, slaves who need to be saved, stakar matchmakes kraglin and yondu, will contain underage sex by USA standards
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-01-04 19:27:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12175173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Write_like_an_American/pseuds/Write_like_an_American
Summary: Yondu Udonta: freshly-freed slave, naive in some of the galaxy's ways and all-too-wise in others.Kraglin Obfonteri: the shy, sly mouse of a stowaway.Stakar Ogord: The unlucky sod trying to get them together.





	1. Yondu's Story

**Author's Note:**

> **The third of my smut fic prompts from tumblr - for the first time Kraglin and Yondu banged. They're both total virgins, and it's gonna be AWFUL. Stakar's gonna get commed mid-sex and I can't wait. There'll be jizz everywhere and Kraglin's probably gonna cry.**   
> 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **PSA: This is a problematic fic. Yondu has been brainwashed and indoctrinated from birth. He doesn't take any agency in freeing himself from slavery. He needs _a lot_ of help to adjust to freed life. If that makes you uncomfortable, here's a novel idea - don't read this!**

 

Yondu Udonta is made to fight.

That's his sole reason for living. He has been groomed from birth for one purpose and one purpose alone, and that purpose is to kill. It helps that he’s very, very good at it.

It’s a routine, of sorts. Butcher adversaries in the training ziggurat, flog deserters and decimate enemies to the Kree state until all that’s left is a rotting heap of corpses, ally and infidel alike united in death, all piled up awaiting Processing.

It's all he knows. All he's ever known. A cycle of dry blood cracking on his knuckles and crusting between his teeth, of screams and gurgles and whistles, of the holos they force you to watch of people in Enemy uniforms burning children and slaughtering freemen so you know that they're evil.

He's a maven in the art of murder. He knows all he needs to. He knows which click means his muzzle is about to be released so he can annihilate everything in sight. He knows which siren means  _return to ship immediately_ and which means  _charge._  He even has the flavors of the pastes they trade their food chits for memorized: the tasteless tubers and the mulched meat that's stripped from the bones of dead slaves, whose carcasses are hauled from the battlefield to the industrial meat grinder in the ziggurat's basement.

In slave terms, he's ancient – practically a geriatric. Few of his kind reach fifteen. Twenty is damn near unheard of. The scientists have to give him special shots each cycle, so his judgement isn’t clouded by hormones. They want him sharp, clear-minded, the perfect killing machine. Yondu wants that too. He knows his worth is measured by the blood he sheds, so he lays back on the chilly table and accepts his shots with pride.

The shots leave bruises and a strange, light-headed sense of loss. But they're worth it, because when the chroniclers recite their kill-tally at the end of the decacycle, Yondu reigns supreme. 

He struts around ziggurat on training days to show off his too-tight collar. They don't come with adjustable sizes; the boys and girls and less binary critters stapled into them as infants ain't expected to survive puberty. It cuts into his vocal cords, making his voice a half-high, half-low grate that the younger slaves mock – and Yondu boxes their ears for.

Yondu doesn't contemplate whether he'd sound the same if he took the collar off. That's ludicrous. It's easier to imagine the end of the universe than a universe where he isn’t a slave.

On the whole, the juvenile slaves ain’t all that bad. Being an old salt, Yondu distils his wisdom – embellishing battle tales where necessary to keep their interest – as they lay in their cages at night. He hopes at least some of them outlive him. After twenty long years he's too damn old to watch more friends die.

Then Stakar Ogord happens, and Yondu realizes just how young he is.

 

* * *

 

 

It shows, sometimes. Other things show too – like the blankness behind the grin that forms on automatic whenever there's slaughter in the air. They accumulate gradually, dark scratches on Stakar's conscience. Hints of  _conditioning._ Hints that Yondu needs more help than he can give him.

But Stakar’s pride launched him to the pinnacle of banditry in this Quadrant. It’ll see him through this too. He refuses to surrender, even as he lays awake at night thinking of how Yondu was so perplexed and wide-eyed and goddamn  _helpless_ when he first broke his chains.

How the fuck was a man supposed to handle free will if he didn’t know what to do with it? No wonder the kid clings to him. And equally, no wonder Stakar pushes him away. Can't let him get too attached – for either of their sakes.

Udonta is an asset. An asset Stakar liberated with his own two hands, undoing the pin at the back of Yondu's collar that he could have removed himself, if he'd only thought to feel for it. But a tool nevertheless. Something to be used, and discarded, and...

Stakar may churn out lies, just like his father (the only difference between them being that Stakar made his business in piracy rather than politics). But he can't delude himself. He cares for the kid.

Rather than dumping him off on Krugarr for therapy, he takes personal control of his rehabilitation. One-two-two-one-three, nicknamed 'Yondu Udonta' for the way his hick accent reverberates through the translator, is crew. And that means he's Stakar's responsibility - like Charlie, or Mainframe, or that skinny Hraxian stowaway he found tucking into his galley stores last week, who chose the flame over the airlock.

There’s no need to worry, Stakar reassures himself, turning languorously on his bed and feeling for the shape of an absent wife beside him. Everything is under control.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Six months after he's bowled headfirst into  _freedom_ _,_ Yondu bounces on his toes outside Stakar's cabin. It’s been five minutes, but he has yet to knock. Stakar, watching through the camfeed at his desk, sighs and buzzes him in.

Once there, Yondu is no less jittery. It's strange – he can whistle through entire battalions, calling them ‘infidel’ and slathering himself with their blood in the way of the Accusers. He's brash and noisy and boastful – nothing like what Stakar expected from a slave. A born performer, through and through.

But take him from his audience and plop him in a private setting? He'll wear a hole through the stars-damned floor grills.

Stakar drops a hand on each shoulder, forcing Yondu to still. It lasts for all of five second. As soon as Stakar relinquishes his grip the jiggle revs up again, like the nervous bounce of a seated thigh: a vibration of energy and blue muscle and skin-tight navy-dyed leather.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, because otherwise Yondu might let this pressure build until it explodes. Then he'll take a swing at Stakar – as is his tendency when faced with situations he doesn't understand. After that, Stakar will either have to retaliate, brig him, or prolong this talk into an all-out therapy session.

“Boss, what’s sex?”

_Hoo boy._

Stakar wonders, very, very briefly, whether when he explains the basic biological process Yondu's face will light up. It does that, when he stumbles across a rare concept in this world of freemen that he understands. Then he’ll gabble excitedly about how his masters taught him  _all about this when he was a brat,_  like they taught him to kill clean and eat the dead raw if he was hungry.

That had been fun to explain to the crew. When he first arrived, Stakar tried integrating him into the dorms. It lasted until a young man overdosed at one of the low-rankers’ not-so-secret monthly wassails, and his buddies decided to dedicate his body to the stars. They made the mistake of leaving him alone ten minutes, as they exchanged unit chits for fireworks at the commissary. When they came back, they found a half-mauled face and a bloody-mouthed Centaurian hauled over Charlie's shoulder, protesting that he didn’t want the meat to go to waste.

One incident among many. It hadn’t exactly earned Yondu friends.

But anyway. If those darker fears are confirmed, nothing can stop Stakar hunting down every last jackass who owned Yondu and feeding them through his vent fans, chunk by gristly chunk. But, for once, those trepidations remain just that.

Yondu looks intrigued. Then shocked. Then disgusted. “You put yer whatty-what  _where?_ ”

“Inside the vagina. Or whichever orifice they would like you to penetrate.”

“Orry-fish. What, like their earhole?”

Stakar blinks. “On some species, I suppose. I haven't had the pleasure of enjoying their company.”

“Okay. So. Uh. You put yer, um, penis, into her, uh, vuh-jeen-ah -”

Hearing him say that jars. It's not just his pronunciation. Stakar’s father avoided giving him The Talk in favor of providing several diagrams, a list of reproductively compatible species marked 'avoid unless you're stupid', and a list of species who tended to devour their partners in the throes of post-coital bliss marked 'avoid unless you're suicidal'. He’s used to using the correct terminology (even though Aleta claims his dirty-talk suffers for it).

But If Yondu wants to fit in among the Ravagers, he's got to speak like them, not their captain.

“Cock,” he corrects. “Pussy. Say them.”

“Cock. Pussy. Pussy. Cock.” Yondu doesn't seem entirely certain, pushing the words from cheek to cheek. “Which one do I got again?”

“A cock. But erogenous zones -” A flicker of confusion. Stakar targets it and defuses it with martial efficiency. He even manages not to blush. “Those are places where one feels, ahem, sexual pleasure. As you have the, uh, standard binary biological male genitalia of a non-ovipositing species, you probably have a prostate too.”

“Huh.  _Pross-_ tate.” Yondu squints down at himself, cupping his soft dick through the crotch of his pants. He steers it to one side, head cocked curiously. “Where's that then? Dunno about you, boss, but I been showerin' myself since I was old enough to walk. M'pretty familiar with all this, and I ain't never seen a  _pross-_ tate.”

Stakar valiantly tries to maintain eye contact. “It's inside you,” he says, after too long a pause. “You stimulate it anally.”

“Anally?”

“You stick a finger up your ass and curl it.”

Yondu's jaw drops. “Up my -”

“Yes.”

“But that's where -”

“I know.”

“And it feels good?”

“Yes. Yes it does.” Aleta insisted they try it. What she wants, she gets – little things like a divorce and three dead children don’t stop her.

Stakar can’t congratulate himself for getting through this conversation straight-faced just yet. When Yondu unbuckles his belt and lets his pants drop to his knees, he loses the battle against changing color. Yondu reveals that old habits from the loincloth days die hard – he’s foregone the underwear Stakar bought for him. He’s cut and hairless and, at first glance, doesn’t appear to have any bollocks – and those are three things Stakar very much wishes he didn’t know.

“Can ya show me, boss? Uh, please?”

As a rule, slaves don’t ask requests of their masters. But, as Stakar and the others remind him when he unthinkingly follows orders, he's free now. Technically, this is progress. Just not in the direction Stakar hoped for.

“No,” he says, welcoming the headache with the familiarity of an old friend. “I can’t. It wouldn’t be right. I’m your superior officer, and you’re a decade younger than me. I don’t want to take advantage.”

Yondu’s bald brow ridges form a perplexed valley. “Don’t being the boss mean you can do anything you want?”

The headache pounds like someone’s knocking on his skull from the inside. Stakar cradles his temples, massaging where thick black sideburns are already stippled through with gray, and wonders whether it would’ve been easier to take Krugarr up on his offer of therapy after all.

“This is something you want to do? Sex?”

Yondu thinks about it, pants drooping around his knees. He’s not used to being asked his opinion, and it can take him up to an hour to formulate decisions on matters as simple as whether he wants seconds from the canteen. Stakar settles himself in for the wait. But before he can check his watch, Yondu makes up his mind. He dips his chin once, rubbing the pale ring of flesh where his collar used to sit.

Dammit. This _does_ make things difficult. However, Stakar has cracked several bank vaults rumored to be impenetrable, and a number more that boldly proclaimed it on their advertisements. He’s pulled heists from A’askavaria to Zukarith, and he wooed the scariest woman this side of Betelgeux. Problem solving is his _specialty._

“Alright,” he says, scribbling a note on his ever-present datapad. “I'll buy you a bot-hooker at the next port.”

“A bot?” Yondu’s face falls. Stakar pauses in his scritching, glancing up.

“That doesn’t appeal? It’s the safest option, and by far the most hygienic.”

Yondu nods along, although he doesn’t look happy about it. “I’ll have sex with whatever you tell me to, sir.”

Stakar clears his throat, doing his best to scrub those words from his long-term memory. He suspects he’ll find them there tonight, muddying his mind with pity as he tosses and turns in quest of sleep. This poor boy. If Stakar could only rewrite time – but alas; that isn’t one of the powers in the Starhawk’s repertoire.

“Would you prefer,” he says slowly, erasing his latest note, “to have sex with a living person?”

Yondu’s pointy ears practically perk – or at least, they give a little wiggle. “How about Marty, sir? I like sharing a cabin with him. He’s real shiny.” He taps a musing finger on his lip. “Don’t think he’s got no orry-fishes, or no dick. But he could always touch my pross-tate” –

 _Stars._ Stakar shakes his head. “I don’t condone relationships between the ranks.”

There went Yondu’s smile. “Oh.”

“It’s not healthy, you understand.”

Yondu’s doleful face tells him he doesn’t. Stakar files that into his cabinet of insomnia-fuel, along with all the rest. “How about a rankless crewmember, then? Someone your age. I’m afraid they won’t be shiny – we don’t have any other Pluvians on board.”

Yondu’s blurted confession, innocent though it is, held promise for the future. Not long before the boy rises through the ranks. Once they weed him free of his slave mentality, Stakar expects him to flourish. He’ll shoot to the top, riding on the bow wave of that marvellous arrow.

And then? Well, if Marty reciprocates, who can say what fate the stars might map out?

First though, Yondu needs experience. And in order to do that, he needs companionship. Stakar just needs to locate a suitable candidate.

“Leave it to me,” he says, attaching the memo to his datapad’s calendar. “I’ll find you the perfect match.”

Yondu does his pants back up. He shrugs. “Sure, boss.”

 

* * *

 

The kid's watching him again.

He's a spindly thing, flesh stretched tight over his bones. Yondu reckons he must be around seventeen, although his beard's thicker than Yondu's and, judging by the scars in the target he's supposed to be aiming for (rather than sneaking peeks at Yondu) he knows his way around a knife.

His eyes are watery grey-blue and rimmed with lashes as spiky as his stubble. They flick between his mannikin and Yondu, regular as a metronome, back and forth and back again.

Yondu likes an audience.

His recitation of the moves – kick, low leg sweep, hook, hook, kick – becomes less rote-learned and more performance. He dances like he’s performing for a prospective master at auction, showing the boy the scrunch and stretch of muscle where it lassos his thighs in voluptuous bands.

He prefers to train in a loincloth, naked on hot days. But last time he started taking his clothes off in the drill hangar, master (no, _Admiral;_ gotta remember to call him Admiral) made that face he always makes when Yondu gets something wrong. Brows beetling, mouth downturned, wrinkles folding like a back-pushed curtain.

His frown ain’t a severe punishment, not compared to whips. But while no lashes flay the skin from his back and he has yet to be rebranded, the Admiral’s disappointment still aches something rotten.

And so Yondu wears tight leather pants, part of the ensemble Admiral provided him with upon welcoming him to his crew. They crease uncomfortably when he lands from his highest aerials, and he resists the urge to pluck out the wedgie, folding in a liquid sweep of blue skin to touch his toes.

The kid has, by this point, dropped his knife. Stalking unnoticed through the training hall door, Stakar notices, and smiles.

 

 


	2. Kraglin's Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Six months previously....**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Here's some backstory for Kraglin! This fic's very higgledy piggledy in turns of structure, as I'm writing on the hoof... Nevertheless, enjoy!**
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> **CN: use of c-slur, ableism. Kraglin's not the most PC.**
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Kraglin Obfonteri is made for thievin'.

He's a skinny slip of a lad, as the Beggar Boss says, cupping his hands so their palms face the smoke-greased cavern ceiling. Perfect for getting into and out of places unseen.

Kraglin's fingers look thinner than ever, clasped between bandaged clubs. Leprosy burns through the beggar colonies like a flame through tinder, leaving crutches and stumps in its wake. But it also makes for a decent profit. It ain't uncommon for the whores to lop off their brats' fingers and toes, make an extra dime off their misery.

This is the era of the end. Commerce and interplanetary trade falter as Hrax falls from grace, going from a major port to yet another washed out refuelling station populated by stragglers, hookers and thieves. As the tourist buses arrive with less and less regularity, more and more desperate measures are needed to make mint.

Whoever Kraglin's mother was, she spared him the beggars' trade. It's the one thing she did right. He still resents her for turning down the abortion – he’s another rmouth to feed among the Beggars, and he ain’t allowed to forget it. But at least he’s got legs. When he’s caught scooping pastries into his pocket, piping hot flakes of pastry scalding his wrists, at least he can run faster than the baker chasing him.

The cripples watch as he makes his rounds of the dockyard, dipping into pockets and purses, snaffling food from the crooked stalls. At least, the ones with eyes watch. The rest just sit, mouths numb from repeating the ply of their trade.

“Alms for a beggar, ma'am? Spare a unit for a lass left ravaged by a lightless galaxy?”

Ain't much light to be found on Hrax, regardless of whether you have eyes or otherwise. Kraglin lives in a literal underworld – a chthonic labyrinth bored into the earth. Stone pillars support the larger cavern rooves, while tunnels burrow through loose sediment, prevented from collapsing by struts of timber and weld-scarred steel.

Swarm up one of the dilapidated ladders, avoiding the dodgy rungs, and heave open the rusty manhole at its top. Then you'll find that the planet is as barren and sunless on its surface as it is beneath.

Once upon a time, Hrax was a thriving hub of industry. The Nova Corps colonized it during the Imperial Era, selected it to house their filthiest factories and their most polluting manufacturing plants, thanks to the native population's resilience to gas.

Nowadays, that machinery rusts defunct. Scaffold cathedrals loom over the slums. Their creaks linger on the fringes of hearing no matter how deep into the burrows you crawl. They tilt at alarming angles, and every so often an entire warehouse will crumble, masonry crumpling and I-beams swinging like clock-pendulums. Ceilings buckle under their own bowed weight, crushing the hobos and squatters until all that stands are doorframes and charred black chimney stacks, which penetrate the planet's crust, belching into the petrochemical soup that Hraxians call an atmosphere.

All in all: not likely to feature on the interstellar version of _House Hunters_.

The Nova mined their resources and utilized their workforce. Now Hrax has been emptied, a fragile earthquake-ridden shell, it is of no further use to them. In another century, they'll deem it uninhabitable after a major landslide culls quarter of the population. The survivors will be shipped off to one of their many refugee camps, and they'll be expected to act grateful for the privilege.

But that day is due after Kraglin's dead. He ain't gonna give a shit either way. In the here and now, the one thing he cares about is not getting caught.

His mark wears civilian clothes. More fool him – his lack of Nova epaulettes marks him as a target. He ain't from these parts. You can tell by the flicker of a forcefield over the bridge of his nose. That's working overtime, siphoning the carcinogenic dust from the air that Kraglin's been snorting since birth. But more obvious still, for all his attempts to blend in, he doesn't have any tools of a trade.

Unemployment is rare. Everyone has a craft. Most of these are sub-legal, but that's inconsequential. No matter what walk of life a Hraxian finds themselves sloping along, their clothing reflects it. The organ traders wear oilskin trenchcoats, with a foil lining that insulates their wares from the stifling heat. The buskers carry their unit chits in their caps and jangle when they walk.

This man doesn't even have a padded jacket like Kraglin’s, its pockets lined with the day's meager pickings. He looks like he just stepped off a Xandarian transport, headed inland from the surface docks. Which means that first, he has business in town, and second, he has a ship. A ship left unattended.

Kraglin's bones are bound to this poisoned soil. He's lived on Hrax his whole life – too long to consider leaving. No sane recruitment officer would take on a Hraxian urchin, not given the leprosy risk. Especially not one with a missing underjaw of teeth.

Hraxians have three skills for which they are known – the old noble execution method of the Bone Gallows, where the spine is dragged up through the back of the neck; their resilience to pollution; and their chompers.

Kraglin never mastered the first. There's a knack to it, something taught only to the warriors of yesteryear, before the Nova planted their flag. It did those warriors no good, and it doesn't help Kraglin none either.

He's of a weedy constitution – he'd actually succumbed to a bout of common cold the year before last, when the smog was so thick you had to pick your way with one hand outstretched in front of you, and the other on your knife hilt. And, to top it off, after a mishap under the Beggar Boss's tutelage, he's lacking six teeth on the bottom row: two incisors and a canine on either side.

The gap makes his speech lisp strangely. He has to clap a hand over his mouth to keep it watertight when he drinks. It ain't attractive, and it leaves the infamous Hraxian bite, rumored to be able to put dents in titanium, rather redundant.

All in all, Kraglin has very few qualities of interest to the Nova headhunters who troll his market for canon fodder. He's glad. While his might not be the most glamorous profession, at the very least he ain't likely to face down a battalion of Kree war-slaves. No; he prefers the shadows, skulking around the buttresses and snipping purses on the sly. This is where he belongs.

And so, when he creeps behind the blue-coated man, close enough to slip his Duplicator from his sleeve, he doesn't plan on stealing the ship and fleeing. Not even on selling it to the highest bidder. Spaceborne vessels come with pesky things like trackers and beacons. Anyway, Kraglin doesn't know how to fly.

He's just going for a snoop. That's all – he's already hit the day's quota. If the man is stupid enough to visit Hrax alone, Kraglin can clear out his stocks and pry a few of the shinier button casings off his console, to flog as gimcrack next time a tourist shuttle docks.

Hold the Duplicator in proximity with a keycard for thirty seconds, and you have yourself a perfect replica. It's exact down to the last loop of circuitry. The cheep as the light turns amber is lost beneath the crunch of a compacting factory far in the distance, and the rustle of clothing made oily by the smog.

Captain Ogord frowns. He pauses, turning in a slow circle that makes the flow of people split around him like a river parting for a rock. He finds a crowd full of nondescript Hraxian faces, each as hollow-cheeked and forgettable as the next.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Comments = <3**


	3. Walk This Way

Six months later, Kraglin finds himself somewhere he'd never expected. Uprooted from the Hrax’s lightless cityscapes, he’s a spacefarer with no planet to call his home. He’s part of a crew, sworn to the Ravager flame. And now, one practice dummy and ten poorly thrown knives later, Kraglin fails as badly at banishing his flush as hitting his target.

Thirty feet away, a blue man twists like a coil of smoke. He flows through a move that would pop each and every one of Kraglin’s joints. The man – Yondu Udonta; Stakar's prodigal pet – spins in a sleek circle, decapitating an invisible enemy before performing a flawless kick. He boots behind himself, high in the air, a perfect split. Had his opponent existed, his heel would’ve caught their chin hard enough to make them bite off their tongue.

Kraglin realizes his jaw is dangling. If he leaves it there much longer, drool will drip through the gap in his teeth.

Oh dear. This could be, as the Beggar Boss used to say, rolling his stumpy fingers over Kraglin's own, _quite the predicament._

“Boys.”

Hrax might not be at the forefront of interstellar trade, but enough commerce passes through that Kraglin can identify most species in a Xandarian encyclopaedia. Therefore, he knows that for some the phrase 'jumped out of their skin' is unnervingly literal. Hraxians, to his knowledge, aren’t capable of such feats – or at the least, they aren’t capable of surviving them. Kraglin nearly tests that, as Stakar Ogord steps into the hall and drops a broad palm on his shoulder.

It's the same hold he used to drag a young stowaway out of his M-ship’s larder. Kraglin had been starving by the time the M-ship docked. He accidentally locked himself in the hold, and laid there quivering amid barrels of ill-gotten medical supplies with his grafted key at the core of his tight-squeezed, white-knuckled fists.

Stakar didn’t use a headlock, or a frogmarch, or shackles. He simply gripped Kraglin's shoulder, gentle but firm, and, after asking politely whether he’d rather join up or take a short walk from the nearest airlock, guided him to the tailors to be fitted for his slim blue coat.

Now, as then, Kraglin's air leaves him in a rush. He’s going to die. This is a step above stealing food when you’re starving. He's been caught staring at something valuable, something that belongs to someone else. Coveting it. _Stupid._ What sort of thief gets caught casing their mark?

Kraglin shrivels. He doesn’t know much about Stakar’s abilities, but he’s heard enough rumors to be terrified. He expects the hand to sear white-hot, sizzle him away until all that's left is charcoal.

It'll look like he spontaneously combusted. Perhaps they'll erect a plaque to warn rookies of his foibles: _here lies Kraglin Obfonteri, last idjit to ogle the Admiral's pet._

Fact is, silence spreads like a petrochemical fire whenever Yondu enters the mess hall. Whatever table he plonks his tray on, it clears faster than if he had leprosy.

It’s not that no one _likes_ Udonta. But the guy’s a mystery, and spacefarers tend towards the superstitious. Mysteries ain’t good news.

Yondu disengages his VR-goggles, kaleidoscopic colors fading from the glass. His skin shimmers satin-blue with sweat. He lopes towards them, leather clinging to his thighs and groin.

“Captain Ogord,” he says. First time Kraglin’s heard his voice. It’s two-tone, high and low at once. “Someone ya need me to kill?”

He inclines his head as if he means to bow. It's a split-second mistake, and he corrects himself instantly – bashing his fist off his chest instead. But you don't survive the slums without being observant. The war never reached Hrax, but the rare deserter found their way there, to die with tar-clogged lungs in some squatter-hole or another.

They brought stories, as travellers do. Stories of war slaves and minds broken from young. They rarely had happy endings.

“No, Yondu,” Stakar says. He squeezes Kraglin's collar flap, kneading the leather. “No killing. Not today.” Well, that's a relief at least. Kraglin still cringes when Stakar nods at him. “Have you and Obfonteri met?”

Yondu gives Kraglin a once-over. His elevated breaths swell his pectorals like the rise and fall of a wave. “I know his face,” he says, hesitant.

Stakar's smile has yet to waver. Kraglin clears his throat.

“Uh, I'm done with my practice sir, so if I can just -”

“Oh? So something about his face caught your interest?”

Yondu rolls his muscular shoulders. He casually flips a foot behind him to flex his quadricep, draining the lactic acid build-up of a long and athletic workout. He repeats the process on the opposite leg.

Kraglin's pulse peaks. He focuses on the holes he left in his training dummy. They seal over one by one, granules snapping magnetically back into place. All attempts to distract himself are useless though: Yondu hooks a finger under his chin and tips the face in question towards the solars.

“Eyes,” he says, after a minute of curious scrutiny while Kraglin does his best not to fall over. “They're cloud-colored. Like them marbles you bought me, from the market where I was freed.”

Is that a compliment? So long as Yondu doesn't pop ‘em out their sockets.

Kraglin tries for a smile. Yondu seems unfazed by the gaps in his teeth. When he grins, warm thumbs pressed against Kraglin's stubble, he reveals a motley mishmash of enamel and silver and glinting, fine-carved gold. “I like him. Can he be my friend?”

Stakar chuckles. “No, Yondu,” he says while Kraglin remembers how to lock out his knees. “You don't ask me for permission. You ask _him_.”

“Can I be yer friend?”

“And,” Stakar continues, before Kraglin can croak a dazed affirmative, “friendship does not germinate instantly. It grows, from time spent together and experience shared.”

“Time spent together an' experience shared,” Yondu echoes, nodding like he's wise to Stakar's guff. “Do friends put their cocks in each other?”

Stakar raises an eyebrow, immune to the coughing, choking ailment that strikes Kraglin down. “Occasionally,” comes the mild reply. “If both parties consent. Obfonteri – uh. Obfonteri? Are you alright, son?”

Kraglin punches his chest in what could either be the Ravager salute or a self-imposed Heimlich. “Yessir?” he wheezes.

“I'm of the opinion that Yondu needs to get out more. Mingle with people his own age. Make friends, form relationships, as is natural for a young man. How old are you again?”

“Eighteen, sir,” says Kraglin, repeating the same lie he’s told since he arrived. Stakar's teeth are so straight and white that his beam is bright as starshine.

“ _Excellent_. Alright then. Yondu – perhaps you should give Kraglin the grand tour of the place?”

“I've been here six months, sir. I can find my way -”

“The observation deck, perhaps? We're coming up to a jump point, but once we pass it, we'll be directly opposite the Ghrangu Nebula. It's quite stunning this century. I'll arrange some snacks from the galley, maybe some of that fruit juice you like...”

Yondu perks, taking the shirt Stakar hands him. He burrows into it headfirst, like a child still learning what limb goes where. It’s an expensive weave, designed for softness, and Kraglin’s garb looks dingy in comparison, like something salvaged from a dumpster. Yondu plucks at the seams with barely-contained distaste – perhaps he can be tricked into a trade.

“Might need a shower first. Wanna come, Obfonteri?”

“I think,” Stakar intervenes when Kraglin starts sputtering again, “that we ought to move slowly. For both of your sakes. Yondu -”

“Whas wrong with him? Do he got a punctured lung?” Yondu's animated features twist to melancholy. “My first freeman friend, an' he's dead in a minute. Thassa real shame.”

“No, no. It's just.” Stakar's eyes meet Kraglin's: watery and bloodshot, pupils pinpricked amid a rheumy blue glaze. “He's just a little shocked.”

“Uh, yeah.” Yondu looks dang near _bashful._ “Cap'n says I can be a lil' boy-stir-us.”

“Boisterous.”

“That.”

Kraglin manages a gargle of “S'no problem.” It's even audible.

Stakar knows he won’t get anything from him but guppy-gasps and bubbles. At least, not while Yondu’s in the vicinity.

“Shower,” he says. It’s close enough to an order that Yondu snaps upright and sets off for the cubicles attached to the training room at a march.

His ass is a beacon. Like peaches clad in leather. Kraglin’s trapped cocks twitch against his inseam, one on each side, and he struggles to tear his gaze from that muscular swivel. It’s worth the effort. Kraglin finds the Admiral watching him, and this time, the smile is absent.

“Obfonteri and I have a lot to discuss.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Have some more of this! It's shovel talk time... Poor Kraglin. Sorry I've been slow lately - in a Glump (like a grump but glummer)**


	4. Chompers

Yondu Udonta cosies up to the brass. He whisks his arrow through Stakar’s enemies, screaming ‘Infidel!’ like a Kree. And yet, despite the mayhem, his whistle would remind Kraglin of a choirboy singing the _ave,_ if he knew what a choirboy was.

He’s a conundrum. A paradox. An ex-slave who gets scolded for following every order sent his way. The Ravagers don’t understand him, don’t understand his relationship with Stakar, any of it. And they don’t bother learning.

Really, Kraglin ought to follow their example.

As soon as the door shuts and Kraglin's breaths even to a point where he ain’t tempting hypoxia, Stakar rounds on his newest recruit.

He glares. It ain’t just any glare. This glare makes the scum of the galaxy shiver low in their boots. Stakar’s brows dive together, steep as the banks of a wadi. Starfire crackles around his pupils like the corona on a solar eclipse.

The best way to survive in a galaxy that is at best apathetic to your survival is to cower a lot, apologize more, and whip out your knives only when presented with a retreating back. No chance of that here. Under Stakar’s white-hot glower, Kraglin retains bladder control through willpower alone.

“Yessir?” he squeaks. “You wanted to talk to me?”

“Indeed.” Stakar scans the score card, which hovers in the air besides the knife-hatched dummy. “You need more practice before you can go out in the field.”

“I-I know, sir. I'm working on it. I've already improved by -”

“It's a shame. I would prefer you to accompany Yondu on missions. But...” He shrugs. The solars cascade from above, and Stakar's shadow falls over Kraglin like a cool black sheet. “Perhaps there's something in this. Work and play are best kept separate – you only have to look at Aleta and I to understand that.”

“You and Captain Aleta, sir?”

“Never mind. Let's keep the conversation on what's important – you and Udonta. Have you spoken to him before today?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you wanted to speak to him?”

Kraglin licks his lips. He thinks of snapshotted blue and red, glimpsed from a shuttle window. He might not be cleared for combat, but he’s skinny enough to play powder monkey. As a Hraxian, he was a thief. Now, as a Ravager, he spends his battles scampering between the gun ports, loading plasma balls into their on-ship artillery and switching out the battery packs before they deplete.

Corpses blur together, when you see them from high above. They’re paper-people, names and numbers, no more real to him than the necroblast-scoured plains of the Xandar-Kree battlefields, which are reported on holographic hoardings wherever they make port.

Their deaths don’t register. Yondu’s whistle does. Kraglin remembers pressing his nose to the glass, gasp fogging the window as an arrow nipped and twirled.

“He scares me,” he admits. “Just a little. He’s killed a lot of people.”

Stakar raises an eyebrow. “He’s a Ravager. It’s part of the job.”

“A _lot_ of people. In like, five seconds, sir.”

“Hm. All dead on my command.”

“Oh.” Blood drains from Kraglin’s face. “I’m sorry sir, I don’t mean, uh…”

He’s tying himself in knots and he knows it. Thankfully, the eyebrow descends. Stakar breathes out, thumbs hooked in his holsters.

“I don’t blame you for being afraid of him, kid. Most folks are.” He watches the nanites complete their job, weaving magnetic fibers over the gashes in the target. “And yet, despite that fear, you still practice in the same training hall.” His eyes twitch to Kraglin, whose sagging attention snaps stiff. “You’re not an assassin, are you?”

Kraglin’s guts plummet for the bilges. “N-no,” he squeaks. “No sir, I swear!”

“You wouldn’t tell me if you were.” Stakar unhooks a datapad from his belt, scrawling himself a note with his finger for a stylus. “Aleta’s far better at interrogation. I have concerns about letting anyone befriend Yondu who isn’t thoroughly vetted; perhaps I shall ask her to pay you a visit.”

Kraglin shrinks. His chin squidges into his neck like a tortoise trying to retreat in his shell. “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t have any, sir?”

“Come again?”

“Maybe that’s why he doesn’t have friends, sir? Because…” The connotations of what he’s implied strike Kraglin far too late. What is with him and insulting his superiors today? If he leans away any further he’ll lose his balance.

Stakar doesn’t roast him to a crispy Hraxian wafer. That’s a plus. He strokes his sideburns instead. For a moment, it almost looks like he’s considering Kraglin’s advice _._

“Perhaps I _am_ a little overprotective.”

The clunk from the waterpipes means Yondu’s shut off the shower. Not long before he swaggers out, an expanse of hairless blue. _Wet_ hairless blue. Kraglin’s cocks perk at the thought.

Stars, he needs to get a handle on himself. Just because he has yet to wet his dicks – factoring the beggar boss’s cut into his daily spoils, he barely had enough disposable income for food, let alone prostitutes, and most of them had the pox anyway – it doesn’t mean he should fall for the first guy who professes interest. Easier said than done, of course.

But if there’s one thing growing up Hraxian taught him, it’s that if you can do something well, you never do it for free.

“He really does scare me,” he says. “I don’t think I can do this, sir. Not without a bit of an, uh. Incentive.”

Stakar frowns. “I’m not going to bribe you to be his friend.”

“I’m more like… training wheels, right?” Kraglin points to the dummy, whole again and ready for the next onslaught. “Like you said, boss. Friendship’s gotta grow. And I’d _like_ to be friends with Yondu, I really would. It’s just, if he flips and whistles me through –“

“He won’t. Not unless I tell him too.” Like _that’s_ reassuring. Kraglin grimaces, reminds himself to smile, and continues.

“Please sir. It’s for my own peace of mind. If there’s a chance he’s gonna kill me, I wanna go to the Hraxian afterlife whole.”

Stakar squints. “I didn’t realize your race was religious.”

They aren’t. Kraglin hurries on.

“New bottom teeth, sir,” he says, keeping his voice meek and his body language small. “Thas all I want. I been savin’ up, but I can’t afford ‘em yet. You fix my chompers, I’ll hang out with your kid.”

He sounds a lot more confident than he lets on. You don’t pickpocket your way around the Hraxian subterranea without perfecting the gifts of the gab. He may have never had a proper friend before – if you let another beggar close you were asking to find your thief’s jacket sliced open, every stashed unit chit rootled out of its lining – but it can’t be that difficult. Right?

“He likes my eyes, sir. Promise I’ll be good to him.”

Stakar shakes his head. “If he finds out I bought your friendship –“

“He won’t. All he needs is a booster step, right? Someone to get him out there, stop the crew from seein’ him as your pet –“

Stakar’s eyes flash – quite literally. “ _He is no pet._ ”

Kraglin holds up his hands. He talks dry, the spit having evaporated from his throat, along with the gloss from his eyes and the grease from his pimply teenaged skin, all blasted away by the roar of the inferno Stakar had, for a split most fraction of a second, shown him.

“I ain’t sayin’ that. Sir, I’m sorry. Meant no offence. Thas just what the other men think. S’why no one talks to him, no one approaches him.”

Stakar groans. “You’re saying it’s not just him the men are afraid of. They’re scared of me.”

Kraglin’s throat swells around his gulp “I don’t mean to be imperty…”

“Impertinent. Don’t worry, Obfonteri. I believe you’ve solved my problem.” The hand returns to Kraglin’s shoulder. This time Kraglin stands tall under its weight, a scrawny reed of a boy masquerading as a man. “If I don’t want Yondu to grow up isolated, I need the crew to trust him. If I need the crew to trust him, he needs a friend from among their number. And if I want you to be that friend…”

Does Kraglin feel guilty for demanding a pay-out? Yes, somewhere deep, deep down. But Hraxian roots run deep.

“Teeth,” he says hoarsely, running his finger over the puckers in his gum. “Then I’m all Yondu’s, sir.”

The hand on his shoulder releases. It extends to him instead, and Kraglin, after a moment’s hesitation, clasps it. “Report to the medbay tomorrow. Do you have any preference for metals? Your kind don’t suffer from lead toxicity, do you?”

This is actually happening. He’s brokered a deal with the Ravager captain. He’s getting his teeth sorted out, and he gets to spend time with Yondu into the bargain. Kraglin smiles wide enough to show off the gap in his bottom set, as he shakes his head to Stakar’s question and pumps his hand hard.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Thank you to everyone who leaves comments and kudos! I love you all.**


	5. Dinnertime

Stakar pings the coordinates on a private channel. It's all very formal, like he's been summoned to a debriefing before his first solo – which, Kraglin supposes, this technically is.

His gums sting. The doctor insisted he swill disinfectant from cheek to cheek (and made a fuss over him swallowing it, until she remembered he was Hraxian, and the usual rules about  _poisoning_ and _chemical esophageal burns_ don't apply). He shambles along, trying to convince himself that the buzz in his chest is a sensible and evolutionarily advantageous fear.

Fear of the unknown. Fear of authority. Fear of the guy who could kill him with pursed wet lips and a blow.

He makes a shoddy job of it. For every step, his heart buoys higher up his throat. By the time he nears the Admiral and his protege, Kraglin is grinning wide enough to show off his new chompers.

Yondu grins too. He stands at a loose at-ease, as if awaiting further instruction – but at Kraglin's approach he breaks from his admiral's side and barges in close, far too close. He reaches into Kraglin's slackening smile to stroke his incisors.

“New gnashers!”

They taste odd. Bitter and metallic, like the lead amalgam has stuck to the tip of his tongue. But Yondu's finger tastes too: warm skin, a touch salty. That familiar, treacherous light headedness spreads through Kraglin, like his brain's been sieved out through a colander.

“Mrgrbl,” he says, eloquent as ever.

“Yondu,” chides Stakar. “Ask for permission before touching people.” He's tagged along – of course he has. This is a business transaction; he's ensuring that Kraglin will uphold his end of the bargain. Kraglin intends on it. He would've done this, new teeth or otherwise. Not that Stakar needs to know that. The Admiral might want Yondu to have a friend, maybe even a... bed companion (Kraglin's cocks make a simultaneous buck at the thought). But Kraglin curls shyly around his affection for Yondu, like it's something fragile and delicate that only he needs to know.

Just a stepping stone. That's all he is. Training wheels, before Yondu blazes his trail through the abyss. Stakar doesn't foresee him becoming a permanent fixture, and Kraglin's too much of a pessimist to hope.

Once Yondu backs away and performs his apologetic bow-plus-chest-thump, Kraglin can breathe again. He smiles at him, bright and chipper, letting him see where the moulds are jammed into his gum. Stakar might've forked out on the surgery, but he was too miserly for anesthetic. Kraglin is grateful, in hindsight. He doesn't want Yondu to see him drooling.

“They're new,” he lisps proudly, turning his head into the light. “Real shiny too, see?”

Yondu nods, a blue puppy on steroids. “Like mine!” He hikes up a lip, as if Kraglin hadn't gotten a squint at his fangs the previous day. “Stakar, look. He's got teeth like mine!”

Stakar smirks at Kraglin in a calculated way. He must think Kraglin planned this – that he's smart enough to know how elated Yondu would be to find someone else whose mouth is composed mostly of metal. In truth, it's exactly as it seems – a ploy to eke a little extra out of an already sweet deal. But Kraglin's happy to be overestimated. He rolls with it, and smiles back.

But they can only grin at each other for so long. Awkwardness gnaws. The scenario plays out strained and stilted: a performance for Stakar's benefit, as he tips the pair of them a nod, makes his excuses, and retreats. Kraglin's glad to see him turn down the long straight corridor. This way, he knows he's not eavesdropping around the next corner, expecting Kraglin to shank Yondu and drag him out the airlock.

Yondu's oblivious to the atmosphere. “C'mon,” he says, tugging on Kraglin's arm. His beam shines, fresh and free as a child's. It should look out of place on a man who weighs twice as much as Kraglin after a dousing. “What d'you wanna do? Stakar says friends do stuff together.”

Kraglin's dicks have plenty of ideas. Instinct diverts blood below his belt, where it ought to be funnelled into coordinating the acts of walking, talking, and not visualizing Yondu's ass. However, Kraglin ain't got the first clue how to initiate fuckery, much less see it through. He wouldn't know where to start.

Friendship first, he decides. What happens next is for the cosmos to determine.

“Why don't you choose?” he asks, dodging the question. They're stomping along at a fair old pace. Even Yondu's walk cycle expends as much energy as possible. He bounces on his toes at the peak of every step, and constantly spins to make sure Kraglin is behind him, like the bicep he's clutching might disintegrate between blinks.

“You want me to choose?” His face falls. “I ain't too good at making my own choices yet.”

That puppy analogy is disturbingly accurate. Kraglin nods, encouraging. 

"Ain't too hard. C'mon, what d'you like to do?”

“I...” Yondu waves his hand, stumped. “Like. You?”

Down, boys. Down.

“And?” Kraglin prompts, a little desperate. “What else?”

“I like Stakar. An' Charlie an' Aleta?” At the very least, that makes it impossible to maintain a half-chub. Kraglin shudders. Yondu stops mid-stride, dragging Kraglin to a halt while his opposite hand taps his chin. “Wait, no. Not so much Aleta. Not when she's shouty. I like fightin'. I like trainin'...” He stops. Kraglin waits. Then, once it's apparent Yondu isn't building to a finale, but has simply run out of things to say:

“That's it?”

He doesn't mean to sound incredulous. He certainly doesn't intend for Yondu's eyebrows to crumple, or his scowl to stretch comically huge. At least, it  _would_ be comical, were Kraglin not aware of the arrow, tucked in a loose hip holster, glowing in time with the pulse across Yondu's implant.

Weird and sheltered or otherwise, this is still the deadliest guy in Ogord's army. In terms of sheer destructive power, Yondu is marginally less catastrophic than a warhead. Kraglin hastens to amend himself, before the offence can fester.

“Look. I'll go first. I like...” What does he like again? He can't very well mock Yondu for the paucity of his list then fail to muster up his own. But his mind washes blank. No choice but to glance around for inspiration.

His gaze alights on a pair of Ravagers. They carry canisters, either thermoflasks full of soup, or casks of corrosive engine fuel. Stakar really needs to stop marking everything up in common letters; not everyone on his damn crew can read.

There's a comradely affection between them. One laughs at the other's joke, mock-smacks his knuckles off his bristly cheek. The air between Kraglin and Yondu stifles stagnant in comparison.

“Food,” says Kraglin lamely. “I like food. You wanna go eat?”

Yondu sags at Kraglin's words. His hand slips from Kraglin's arm. “Don't like eating alone.”

Kraglin hadn't realized he'd gotten used to his warm blue cuff, but the palm he rubs over that spot makes for a poor substitute. “Well, you won't be," he promises, nudging Yondu to walk again. "Not today.”

 

* * *

 

And they aren't. Admittedly, no one joins them at their table. But it's past the regular eating hour, and they've selected one to themselves. It's a two-seater, tucked under the swooping gantry of a ventilation pipe, which funnels fumes from the galley and blasts them into the black via a series of internal airlocks: the prime cause of death for on-ship vermin, as well as any saboteur foolish enough to take advantage of their ducts.

Already, people take notice. Kraglin has a thief's knack for telling when someone's watching. He reacts automatically: stooping his shoulders, tucking his chin, making himself unthreatening and small.

Yondu, sat opposite and tucking into his goulash, laughs so hard he shoots chewed yaro out his nose.

“Y'look like a spooked orloni,” he chortles, after mopping Kraglin off. Stakar's dining service offers napkins, but as neither are experienced practitioners, they opt for nature's serviettes: skin and sleeves.

Kraglin suffers the stroke of Yondu's plush top. It's soft, sinfully so. Stars, but he wants to bury his face in Yondu's belly and nuzzle there, so the silky shirt would cling to his stubble.

He swallows his internal horror, at the thought of how much it must cost to dry-clean.

Pet or otherwise, Yondu is Stakar's. Money ain't no issue. He may have grown up with nothing – less even than Kraglin, in possession not even of his soul. But he's adapted to Ogordian opulence, and with surprising ease. Almost like he expects to be dressed up and paraded for his admiral's amusement.

Kraglin can't be sure Stakar hasn't bugged their clothes. He doesn't voice that concern – nowhere except the privacy of his mind.

“Not all of us got whistle-controlled arrows,” he grumbles instead. A coward he might be, but even the most snivelling Hraxian despises having the lily shade of their liver pointed out. “You fight. I duck and run. We all got our ways of survivin'.”

Yondu sniggers again. This time, he swallows his food first. “Yer funny!” he declares. Once he's finished shovelling spiced stew into his face, he sits back, fiddles with the fringe of his shirt and waits, bright-eyed as a bird, for Kraglin to tell him what to do.

Kraglin hunches over his meal. He eats slow, giving himself time to think – and everyone else time to filter to their shift. The blue coats are intrigued by the stowaway who's keeping the admiral's favorite company; they linger until the late buzzer sounds, and even then they drag their boots.

“C'mon,” Kraglin mutters, once the scrape of his fork on his bowl is unbearable. What did Stakar suggest?  _The nebula is particularly beautiful this Astral-Century._ Kraglin belches, daintily scrubs off on his arm hair, and stands. “We're gonna go look at some pretty stars. That'll give ya time to think about what'chu wanna do next, yeah?”

Yondu blinks. “Sleep, most likely. Stakar says eight hours of uninterrupted downtime's important, fer men my age.”

Kraglin resists the urge to sigh. "We'd best hurry then," he says, and leads the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Comments + Kudos = Kisses**


	6. Starlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :claps hands: i'm writing this as I go with very little plotting so WHO KNOWS WHAT'S GONNA HAPPEN NEXT

Conversation flows with all the finesse of Kraglin performing one of Yondu's aerial kicks – i.e. skidding, falling, and using his face as a friction brake.

“So,” tries Yondu, as they contemplate the haze of nebula gas. Comet dust blots the twinkling stars into splodges, like incandescent bulbs shining through smog. “You like food. Whas yer, uh. Favorite?”

“Soup,” says Kraglin on automatic, because it's true. Then reassesses. “Or least, for a long time s'all I could eat. No bottom teeth, y'know?”

“You have bottom teeth now,” Yondu reminds him, like Kraglin can't taste sour metal on his tongue.

Kraglin shows them off, turning his head this way and that to admire his reflection. “I'll try eatin' somethin' crunchy next time I'm in canteen.”

“Good idea.”

They sit in silence for a while. A meteor fizzles by.

Yondu points at it. Kraglin nods. Then, once his partner graduates from tapping his boots on the floor to fidgeting from asscheek to asscheek - “Uh. Y'know what Stakar wanted us to do here?”

“He just said it looked pretty at this time of the Astral year.”

“But it's gotta change every Astral year? I mean, none of this,” Kraglin waves vaguely at this: the cornucopia of space debris and refracted light that wouldn't look out of place on the front of a Xandarian greeting-holocard, “is permanent. It'll be different tomorrow. And the day after.”

Yondu shrugs, tucking brawny arms around his knees. “Stakar knows shit,” he says. He squints at the needling lights of the young stars as if they'll flash in a conceivable pattern if he only stares long enough. “Just gotta trust him.”

Kraglin feels many things for the Ravager Admiral – respect, awe, and terror chief among them. Trust? Well, he's holding out on that one. But Yondu's different. He ain't no stowaway. If you're rescued from a lifetime of slave-auctions and drudgery, you look up to your savior, no matter how blindly.

Kraglin sighs. He leans back on his elbows with his long legs kicked out before him, and settles in to watch the stars.

 

* * *

 

A vague recollection from a half-glimpsed episode of a soap (one of those hour-long weekly sessions of escapism half the crew are addicted to, a quarter denounce as brain-rot, and the remainders publicly shun whilst indulging in on the sly) tells Kraglin he ought to walk Yondu home. Not for them the winding Xandarian streets, balconies overlooking chrome intersections, illuminated throughout the night by floating surveillance spheres. Just a long drab corridor, blocked off from the rabble by a bio-coded airlock.

Yondu doesn't sleep in the crew quarters. That's yet another of those markers that set him apart. He beds down in the part of the ship that's cordoned off for Bridge crew and officers, all of whom occupy duple, triple, and the rare single room, rather than one-hundred man dormitories.

Mutinies are rare in the Ogord fleet. Prey is fat and bountiful, as their territory loops three of the major shipping channels: two spokes that extend from the galaxy's core to its far-flung outskirts, and one cross-ways passage between Shi'ar and Xandarian skies. Well-fed men ain't likely to overthrow their captains. Nevertheless, maintaining distance between ranks is a wise precaution. This barrier-door is common to all ships, whether they're in the merchant trade, cruisers, or pirates.

Kraglin wonders where his and Yondu's friendship fits into that model. Does it even fit at all?

Yondu notices him lagging. He steps past the intrusion-detector matrixes inset into the tunnel walls. “What's wrong?” he asks. Kraglin points.

“Can't go in there. It'll set off an alarm, and Stakar'll be pissed.”

“But my room's that way! How'm I s'pposed to show you my shinies if ya ain't allowed past the door?”

Kraglin's eyebrow winches up. “Yer, um, shinies?”

“Yeah.” Yondu puffs like Orloni knucklebones over an up-flipped M-ship thruster. That's a favorite treat; Ravagers like to heat the marrow until it pops with a snap louder than cracklecorn at a Xandarian cine-complex. “You asked me what I liked. I've thought of somethin'. I like pretty things.”

“Huh.” Kraglin thinks back to their stargazing: the painful crush of metal against his unpadded ass, the strange synergy of his and Yondu's boredom, which made both of them reluctant to admit it first. “Like the view from the observation deck?”

Yondu chuckles fondly at his stupidity. “Nah. Things ya can touch, things ya can hold. Like yer eyeballs.”

Kraglin swallows. “Well, if I ever wake up an' they're missin' I know where to come first.” The joke rings feeble as his voice. Yondu looks perplexed for all of a second – but then he throws his head back and brays a honking laugh.

From behind one of the adjoining doors there issues a loud groan. Kraglin clamps down on all signs of mirth. “You need to be quiet,” he hisses, as Yondu wipes damp from the corners of his eyes. “People're sleepin' here.”

Yondu glances to the source of the noise, pinpointing it with the uncanny accuracy of a hunter. He flaps a careless hand: “Oh, thas just Marty.”

“As in, uh, lieutenant Martinex?”

Yondu nods. “He's my roomie! He's funny. And he's as shiny as some of the jewels I got on my shelf.”

For some reason, that statement inches a festering finger into Kraglin's bowel, wriggling around the inside of his stomach lining. Lieutenant Martinex T'Naga. He's the brightest thing Kraglin has ever laid eyes on – both in terms of intelligence and reflectivity index.

If Yondu has a predilection for shine... Well. Best not to think about that.

T'Naga's zombie grunts increase in volume. Kraglin watches the grubby smile spread on Yondu's face, yellow as a sunbeam.

“Where'd you get yer jewels from?” he asks, mostly to distract himself. “Battles, an' shit?”

He refuses to be envious; his time on the frontlines can't come slow enough. If there's blaster bolts flying, he'd rather be elsewhere. But before taking the flame, he had the run of a planet - albeit one where cave-ins toppled half the tunnels, and the cage lifts were as liable to winch you to the level below as they were to snap and send you, cage and fellow passengers alike crashing into the entrails of their hollowed earth.

Now he has a ship. A large ship, but a ship nevertheless. He never professed any desire to see the stars, but now he's here, it  _would_ be nice to catch a few more glimpses of alien worlds. You can't see all that much through the windows of a transport shuttle, except the frothing, seething mass of Ravagers and the zip of an arrow below.

Yondu nods. “Sometimes. Always offer 'em to the Admiral first – s'only fair.”

That doesn't make sense. Kraglin frowns, head tilting forty-five degrees so his neck stubble grates on his chin. “Thought we all take what spoils we want, divvy up a share for the communal pot? Ain't that how it works?”

Yondu shakes his head. “Not for me an' the Admiral,” comes the simple reply. Then, slurred around his yawn: “Is this where we say g'night?”

The soap makes Kraglin's next move clear. He should lunge forwards, grabbing Yondu by his chin, and tilt him so they slot together, lip to lip. Maybe dip him a little bit too - although he suspects his arms would give out. If all goes well, their teeth won't clonk hard enough to make Kraglin's dentist visit redundant.

But Yondu stands beyond the boundary. The trespasser sensor complicates matters, and if Yondu keeps yawning like that, Kraglin is as liable to get his nose and chin bitten as he is to initiate a kiss. His smile twitches ruefully, hands jammed in his pockets. “Yeah.”

“Right. G'night.” Yondu hesitates though. “Uh. What time's yer work shift start?”

“AB700.” That's the hour allotted to him on the standard workman's chronometer strapped to his wrist. If Yondu grins any wider, he'll dislocate his jaw.

“Thas great! I start an hour later – we can meet in the canteen at AB600!”

Kraglin ain't a breakfast person. He prefers to grab his meals from the pile of to-go containers that teeter on hotplates outside the mess.

They're simple, convenient, and easily disposable. Biodegradable space-tupperware can be flushed down the nearest vacuum-toilet and mulched into the slurried leavings of a thousand and some Ravagers, to be recycled into hydroponics fertilizer and (after a quick reshuffle of the molecules and a whole lot of sterilizing) reconstituted ration stock. Kraglin likes to think that by taking his food in this fashion, he spares some poor comrade in the galleys another load of washing up.

But hey. For Yondu? He'll make sacrifices.

“Sounds good,” he says, gloves catching on greasy hair as he detaches his mohawk from the sweat on his forehead. “I'll see ya in the mornin' then.”

The foregone kiss twists around his brain like a tapeworm. Kraglin waits until Yondu passes through the door, matching T'Naga's moans with equal gusto. Then he turns and saunters to his lousy little bunk in the crew dorms, sleep scratching his eyes and contentment his lips.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **These DORKS. This is an interlude chapter to motivate me to write more... This, uh, may well become Kraglin/Yondu/Marty, because of AbominableSnowDUDE, HavicatKye and Resri.**   
>  _take the blame._
> 
>  
> 
> **Also, this fic just got a big ol' edit! The beginning chapters have been refined from, uh, first-draft fluff. Refined SOMEWHAT.**


	7. Night Hawks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **And we have an Oblo!**

Kraglin sleeps well, all things considered. 'All things' being, in this case, the dream.

The dream goes something like this. He's with Yondu, the pair of them crammed in his bunk. The dormitory, for once, ain’t an overwhelming stewpot of bad breath, gas and foot odor. Not a single snore disturbs the sanctity of their silence.

Ain’t enough room, though. Kraglin’s got too many angles and Yondu too many curves. Between the two of them, their balancing act teeters between precarious and outright suicidal – Kraglin’s near the top of his stack, and it’s a rather long way down.

As soon as that thought crosses Kraglin’s mind, the pallet expands. The mattress is already softer than anything he slept on growing up, but the addition of three extra pillows transforms the scene into one of luxury.

They touch each other, gentle and slow. Kraglin runs the backs of his knuckles across Yondu's cheek. Yondu copies him, sniggering as his nails tweak Kraglin's patchy seventeen-year-old stubble. Kraglin's subconscious has an idea of what it wants, even if his waking mind douses itself in nervous gasoline and cranks the ignition whenever he recalls the way Yondu’s pants cup the globe of his ass.

In the dream though, all fears and trepidations gloss over. Kraglin strokes the velvety-soft scars that lace Yondu's temple. He runs that same hand down his side to discover a simple and eloquent lack of shirt. Before he can panic, their chests crush together, skin hot on skin.

Yondu's so hairless and smooth and  _soft_ despite all that ridiculous muscle, and Kraglin doesn't feel self-conscious about his own wiry thatch of fuzz, because he's got his hands on Yondu's left pectoral and he's  _squeezing,_  and a pulse thunders against his palm that's not his own, and his knee presses between thick blue thighs, and  _stars_ but he can feel too much, way too much, and Yondu isn't wearing pants either.

And Kraglin has no idea what to do next.

Kraglin shoots upright, clonks his head on the bunk above, and collapses flat again, swearing loud enough to earn a volley of boots and sweaty socks from above.

“Ow! Fuck, stoppit!”

He wards off the stinking hail, arms crossed in front of his face. A projectile dangles over the edge of the bunk – a dubiously crusty specimen, caked in the shape of a foot. Kraglin helps it on his way. He swears he hears the sock  _clatter_ as it strikes the floor.

Ogord's men stand on parade occasionally, but on the whole it's a sloppier affair than the Nova ranks. No buckle-buffing or boot polish; Stakar would rather they expended their off-shifts in the practice rinks. If he's got his men lined up for inspection, it's either because they’re running a bomb drill, or Aleta's swung by for a visit and he wants to make a good impression.

Kraglin shifts for his ladder, peering at his chronometer through an itchy blur of sleep. He freezes as a final boot thuds the side of the bunk, ricocheting off into the darkness below, its path down the wall mapped by the grumbles and snorts of Ravagers deep in their lethargy.

As a rule, nobody wakes up until the buzzer, and then only grudgingly. Kraglin is the lone migrant in a sea of shadows, creeping into the ladder shaft and holding his breath as he wills away the creaks.

“Hey,” mumbles Oblo from the mattress below. “Where you goin’, Krags?”

He’s a stringy kid, a year or so Kraglin’s senior. He’s not quite as rangy looking as Kraglin, but thin for a Kylorian, thanks to his huffer-root addiction and some sort of bowel problem that leaves him hogging a bog cubicle for an hour each cycle. He’s weirdly fragile looking, like he’d shatter if you dropped him from a height. He also suffers from vertigo, which means Kraglin may find out how true that is one of these days.

He hopes not. Ogord’s Ravagers are a little rough around the edges, but on the whole they’re decent – strong men, hardy men, men who abide by the Code and never leave a brother behind. If they can’t bring a fallen man back alive, they’ll fight to the ends of hell to retrieve his corpse and scatter his ashes among the stars, so that he might soar with them forever.

It’s a far shot from the bitter self-sufficiency of the Hraxian underworld. Kraglin, who’d spooked at the sound of Oblo’s voice, sheepishly tucks his knife back up his sleeve.

“Can’t sleep. Goin’ for a walk.”

“Hm.”

Oblo rolls, squeezing a belch of drug-tainted sweat from his mattress. Their squad’s laundry day is at the end of the week, but Kraglin knows from experience that only half the crew will bother tramping down to the pods at the galleon’s ass-end, bundling their filthy leathers and linens inside, and ejecting them to bob behind at the end of a long string, accumulating space ice so that they might be beaten clean again by a bunch of unfortunate rookies armed with mallets and masks. He hopes Oblo is among them.

“Heard you sat with Udonta at mess yesterday,” Oblo continues. His half-lidded eyes are just visible in the dark – with the shadows this thick, you can’t see the burst blood vessels.

Kraglin’s arms shake where he clings to the sides of the ladder. The arches of his feet dig into the rusty rungs, his boots dangling around his neck by the laces like a rubber-soled yoke. “What about it?”

He tries to sound stand-offish, like it ain’t a big deal. He fails miserably. Oblo raises his hands. Track marks pock the fluorescent skin on the insides of his elbows.

“Woah. You do you, Obfonteri. Ain’t none of my business.”

But before Kraglin’s sharp-edged response, he’d been prepping a question. Kraglin wants to know what.

“You was gonna say somethin’,” he presses, leaning into Oblo’s smelly enclave to blast him with morning breath. Oblo fakes a snore. He remains unresponsive, despite Kraglin’s grumpy push at his shoulder and the half-hearted threat to roll him over the side of the bunk to his death fifty feet below. It doesn’t take Kraglin a minute to lose patience.

Beneath Oblo slumbers Tullk, a gunner who sometimes oversees Kraglin on his shuttle shifts. He’s known for having no sense of humor until you pour liquor in him. Chief organiser of the under-crew’s parties (all of which are had in the dead of Stakar’s night shift on the opposite side of the galleon, although Kraglin has a shivery suspicion the Admiral knows  _exactly_  what they get up to when an industrial-sized crate of moonshine vanishes from their contraband stock) he is simultaneously the most organized man Kraglin knows and the craziest. One of Kraglin’s first memories of life on the  _Starhawk_ involved watching him chug straight from a barrel of A’askavarian wine while suspended upside down by the bootstraps.

Kraglin’s heard he’s not nearly as scary as he pretends. But equally, he doesn’t want to test that. Not first thing in the morning.

He slithers down the ladder shaft, boots thudding against his clavicle, and heads to the shower block to make the most of the early bird’s hot water ration. He’s got an hour to kill before breakfast with Yondu, which means an hour to run his tongue over his new bottom teeth and contemplate how deep a mire he’s landed himself in, as babysitter-slash-trainee-friend to the Admiral’s project.

Last night had been… Well, not  _perfect._ Kinda awkward, actually – so Kraglin thinks as he cards suds through his hair, rinsing under the faucet.

He elected against using the shower strips. His early exodus might’ve disturbed a few sleepers, but the thunder of enough water to cleanse an entire batch of sweaty, hairy Ravagers would have his entire dorm block at his throat.

He doesn’t  _know_ Yondu. Not really. Until two days ago, he’d only ever seen him from afar: a whirling blue demon, killing everything in sight. Kraglin’s so  _normal_ in comparison that he’s practically non-existent.

What the hell do they have to talk about?

They don’t got no shared experiences, no real points of connection – other than the teeth wedged in Kraglin’s underjaw, payment for his services. And Yondu can never know that Kraglin wheedled a bribe from Stakar, because he’s freakishly naïve and probably thinks things like  _friendship_ are sacred.

More fool him, Kraglin thinks, scrubbing under each pit and carefully sponging his cocks, where they waggle side-by-side amid a tangled nest of hair. Really, he should take advantage of this – see how much he can milk out of Stakar.

But Kraglin’s too smart to push his luck. This is already a mighty sweet deal – adding any more sugar to the pot threatens to leave it overflowing.

He’ll make do with what he has, he decides, dabbing his tongue tip off one metal tooth at a time. He’ll be grateful, and he’ll be the best damn friend Yondu can ask for. And if he’s concerned about why Stakar selected him to be Yondu’s buddy when the guy already shares a room with Martinex, and his sleep-muzzed brain obsessively ponders how long his relationship with Yondu is expected to last… Those are quandaries he can contemplate after he’s had caff.

He dries off, standing under the hot air vent and letting it bake the water off his skin. Heaving his jumpsuit over his shoulders and hopping into his boots, he sets off for the mess hall. He’s still going to be early, but the walk gives him something else to think about other than where the hell he’s supposed to learn the true meaning of friendship before Yondu realizes they’re both flying as blind as each other.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Comments + Kudos = Love. I think (?) CoffeeMage came up with the idea of Ravagers freezing their leathers,  
>  smacking them with a mallet, and calling it laundry. I love it!**


	8. Coffee Morning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We got Gef!**

Salvation comes as he lurks in the corner of the mess hall. It’s salvation in a rather unattractive package, but salvation nevertheless.

He knows a few of the Ravagers on this shift – they start an hour earlier than him and finish an hour later, so there isn’t too much distance. Gef spies him doing his shadow-impression at the table he and Yondu occupied the day before, and galumphs over to make his life miserable.

“Hi, Kraglin!”

“Hi.”

There’s food clogged in his beard, lumps of congealed grease, sprigs of vegetable that look to have taken root. Gef doesn’t notice.

“Did you really sit with Udonta yesterday?” he whispers. Or at least, whispers by his own definition of the word. Kraglin winces, rubbing his ringing ears. No wonder rumors spread so fast.

“Yeah,” he says. Then, just to make Gef’s eyes bug under his goggles: “Eatin’ breakfast with him again today.”

Gef’s jaw drops. A flake of something best left unidentified falls from his whiskers. His thigh flab acts as a safety net. Gef pinches the crumb between trembling fingers, relocating it to his mouth and chewing while staring at Kraglin like he just proclaimed that sunlight shines out his ass when he farts.

“Why?”

Kraglin shrugs, as if it’s no big deal. “He looked lonely.”

“Aw. Thas real nice of ya, Kraglin.” Gef snaps his fingers. “I should sit with y’all too, right! If he’s lonely, he’ll want lots of people around.”

Stars no. Kraglin’s appetite is low enough as it is; he doesn’t need to be put off his morning grits by studying the microhabitats cultivated in Gef’s ginger beard.

Plus, this is his first proper friend. He don’t want to share – not with Gef, not with Oblo, not with that hoity-toity T’Naga kid who’s been promoted to lieutenant at the tender age of twenty-something because he can do a few cool tricks with fire and ice.

And because he’s shiny. Yondu _loves_ shiny things.

Kraglin leans as close to Gef as he can stomach. “Sorry, pal,” he says, patting his beefy shoulder. “Yondu’s kinda shy. Think your ugly mug might scare him off.”

Gef nods along. “It does that. There was this Orloni pup yesterdays, y’see. I were tryin’ to get him to come to me cause I wanted to pet him but he jus’ ran off, and Half-nut sez it were because I’m too ugly.” He looks all doleful about it too.

First time Kraglin met Gef, he was getting his basic medical, as afforded to all new members of the crew, and Gef was being treated for rabies. Some people just don't learn.

Of course, before _that_ Gef accrued a lump on his noggin that shorted his brain back to toddler-levels of IQ. So yeah, some people literally _can’t_ learn. But Kraglin only saves enough pity in his chest for one poor bastard who the universe chomped on and spat out again. He don't got room for two.

The same poor bastard just ambled through the door. Yondu shoots sunny grins left and right that no one returns. He ain’t spotted Kraglin yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

And after that, only a matter of time until his ass parks on the chair Gef’s currently occupying. Until his knees bump Kraglin’s under the table, and he picks up his hand to play with his long skinny fingers. Until Kraglin shyly strokes his foot along Yondu’s inseam, and Yondu makes a wet, whimpery noise in the back of his throat, and suddenly they’re back in his dream and there’s endless blue flesh before him and he ain’t got the first clue what he’s supposed to do with it.

“Kraglin?” Gef prods his forehead. “You gone a real funny color, brother”

Kraglin’s cheeks blaze hotter than a supergiant. He had to press the backs of his hairy hands to them to assure himself they ain't a fire risk. Yondu’s gaze roves the hall, locks onto him and his buddy and –

The grin droops. Yondu’s a caricature of a man – always so animated, painting expressions across his face like he’s putting on a pantomime. Kraglin can see his body language slump from delighted to dejected from the other side of the room.

Shit. Gef’s in the place Yondu took yesterday. What does that look like, to a guy who’s used to eating alone?

Kraglin’s teeth are at stake. What will Stakar do, if Yondu goes crying that his new friend abandoned him?

A memory shines through, like a gigawatt M-ship headlamp splitting space's velvety black. Ten years ago, the beggar boss rubbed his fingerless hands around Kraglin’s jaw. They stank of infection and unchanged bandages, and Kraglin made the mistake of flinching. His cheeks were smooth back then, before he grew his first smattering of stubble. But his milk-fangs had dropped, and the bright little chits that had finished pushing through his gum the year before proclaimed him an adult in the eyes of his bruised and battered world.

Pliars wedged in his mouth. A tug, a bolt of pain. Blood that clogged his tastebuds and left a thick copper film on his tongue.

_One of these’ll earn ya five scrip, Kraglin my boy. I’ll be takin’ four, to make up for them you tried to steal from me. I think that’s only fair. What ya do with them others? It’s your choice._

Kraglin, blood streaming down his chin, stared at the tooth that had, until recently, taken up tenancy in his gum. It looked so small, so delicate. The enamel shone, the brightest thing for miles. An unrotted tooth – the closest thing his people had to ivory.

 _My choice,_ he burbled, blowing wine-red bubbles, stomach sick from the pain.

The Beggar Boss nodded. _It’s your body,_ he said, simply. _I run a business, I don’t keep slaves._

Back in the present, Kraglin probes the swelling around the roots of his new gnashers. Doc says he can expect blood and pain for a while longer – his gums sealed shut, over the years since that first impromptu dentists’ operation. There ain't no more space left for a canal. They had to bore it manually, and if Kraglin hadn’t cultivated a very high pain tolerance during early life, he might’ve chundered as she lay each sharp lead fang against his gum and tapped it into place with her mallet.

“Half-nut’s right,” he says, shoving Gef’s shoulder. “Go on, scat. You got yer shift startin’ any moment, anyway.”

Gef dithers, although he scoots back the stool. “Why don’t’chu bring him to the next party? Might help him loosen up a lil’. Half-nut’s gotta big stash of huffer he says he’s gonna let us dip into if we pay upfront, an’...”

Kraglin is too busy watching Yondu, hovering on the threshold of the mess hall as if he was contemplating bolting. If he runs… If he makes it past the airlock in the officers’ quarters, there’ll be no catching up to him. Kraglin needs to think fast.

“Sure,” he growls, barging Gef with greater urgency. “Yep, sign us both up. Now geddout of here. I told ya – look at him. Yer mug’s scarin’ him.”

Gef apologetically pulls his collar up to the bridge of his nose, hiding that godawful beard. He bumbles away, knocking off tables and chairs, despite his shift mates’ best efforts to remove them from his path. “See ya at the party then, Krags!”

Kraglin hardly hears. He waves to Yondu, big as he dares before self-consciousness locks its lips around him and starts to suck. Gef ain’t the sharpest tool in the box – very far from it, in fact. If he knows Kraglin’s fraternizing with the brass (or, at the very least, with the rankless boy who sleeps in the officers’ quarters and patters after their Admiral like a puppy, before being unleashed on their enemies in a tsunami of whistles, blood, and piercing screams) everyone else does too.

Indeed, several sets of eyes follow Yondu’s tramp to their table. Kraglin doesn’t have the guts to glare at them all, or the authority to make them stop looking. He contents himself that if he can see them, Yondu can’t, being as they’re drilling into his back.

He nudges out the chair with his boot, training his face around a smile.

“Hey.”

“Hey. You, uh. Sure ya don’t wanna go sit with that guy?” Yondu performs a hunched little jerk of his chin in the direction of Gef’s retreat. Kraglin stifles his sigh.

“Yeah. You ever tried caff before?”

The switch flicks in the opposite direction; the unit chit lands obverse-up. Yondu’s grin reels out again, and he slings himself onto the stool, so hard that it chides him with a creak. “I ain’t allowed. Stakar says I got too much energy as-is.”

Kraglin makes a surreptitious survey of the surrounding seats. Plenty of ears cock their way, but there ain't no officers or Bridge crew in the vicinity. No one to grass. He crunches over the table, elbows dug in, eyes hooded and lip quirked up.

“Wanna try?”

He’s expecting a rebellious giggle, a nod. Not the shocked shrink of Yondu’s pupils. “I ain’t allowed! It’s the rules.”

“We’re Ravagers,” Kraglin points out. “Breakin’ rules is kinda what we do. S’practically the job description.”

Yondu shakes his head. “But Stakar says that Codebreakers are scum of the galaxy. Says they don’t deserve to _live…”_

Kraglin ain’t _au fait_ with this Code nonsense the older troops mutter about. It was included in his vows when he took the flame, and he’s caught snippets from casual conversation now and then – _steal from everyone except each other, don’t traffic people, especially not kids_. Stuff like that. Nothing about whether or not you should take caffeine supplement with your breakfast.

He figures that if Oblo’s allowed to snort his powder and inject his hypo needles in peace, and Half-nut can get away with smuggling drugs aboard and running his own little racket in the corners of every party among the rankless men, one sip of caff ain’t gonna get neither of them tossed from the airlock.

He stands, shifting to Yondu’s side of the table, and thumbs over his shoulder at the caff vat. That burbles away besides the gruel tureen, the hot pads neon red.

“Stakar says, Stakar says. C’mon. Live a little.”

Yondu says nothing. He huddles on the chair, gripping its seat so tight his muscles stand out through that ridiculously luxurious thermal shirt.

Alright. If he wants to be like that, let him. Kraglin gathers two mugs from the municipal cutlery rack. He even selects 'em from the clean side, rather than the dirty. Just because Hraxians can survive any pathogen or poison up to and including a small radioactive source, it doesn’t mean the same applies to every species. Kraglin doesn’t want to be hauled out for a court martial after he gives Stakar’s favorite worms.

“I’m bringin’ back two cups,” he calls over his shoulder. Yondu watches him, still clinging to his seat as if it's the life raft keeping him afloat on a turbulent sea. “What we do with ‘em is up to you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **I'm very sleepy - expect an edit in the morning..... Thanks for every comment / kudos!**


	9. Morning Daze

Yondu drinks his caff, but he doesn’t enjoy it. He glares at Kraglin the whole while, like Kraglin’s forcing his hand – looking to sabotage him, get him in trouble, tarnish his reputation as Stakar’s perfect little murder-pet.

If that’s true, Kraglin wants to know, why the hell didn’t Yondu say ‘no’? 

He figures that if Yondu ain’t kicking up a stink, he can’t be hating this too much. Which gives Kraglin license to push a little harder.

“So,” he says, circling his cup to make the mulch swill about at the bottom.

They’ve got a good steamer, and if you leave the dehydrated granules in it long enough, you get a slop-free mugful, silky-smooth and sour as sin. But Kraglin don’t got the patience for that, so he suffers the weak froth at the top and the bitter sludge below, filtering grit between his shiny new teeth.

“Thoughts. Ya like it?”

Yondu takes another sip. “It ain’t awful,” he says, but he’s barely drunk a thimbleful. Kraglin snaps his fingers.

“Ya need sweetener.”

Yondu’s eyes widen. “Stakar says sugar an’ me don’t mix –“

Kraglin nabbed a packet off the breakfast trolley. He meant to save it to slurp on during the shift, keep him buzzing as raw sweetroot fizzled on his tongue.

It’s a tolerable sacrifice. He snips it cross-ways with his teeth, and squeezes the lot into Yondu’s brew.

“It makes it tastier, ‘pparently. Course, I’m used to eatin’ rat, so I don’t care.”

He says it matter-of-fact, not boastful, although he does peek at Yondu from the corner of his eye, gauging his reaction. Yondu grimaces at his cup, the sweetener dissolving in a muddy swirl.

“I ate most of my friends.”

Kraglin frowns. “You was friends with rats?”

Yondu shakes his head like he’s being obtuse on purpose. “Nah. Dead slaves go into the mincer, right? If you got ‘em raw it was like a special treat.” He studies his hands, each big blue paw wrapped around his mug as if he’s sucking up the warmth. “Stakar says freemen friends don’t eat each other when they die. But how’s they supposed to be useful then?”

Kraglin’s tongue dries like he left it on a hot-plate. He pokes it around his cheeks, gathering what little spit remains. “Uh. Freemen don’t gotta be useful. We just get to exist until we don’t, I guess. But, um. You, uh. Ate your friends?”

He shuffles his stool minutely away. Yondu, stirring his drink with one blue claw, doesn’t notice.

“Not _actual_ friends. We was all slaves, and that don’t count.”

“But you _ate_ them?”

Yondu can’t comprehend his shock. “They ain’t people, so I s’ppose it didn’t matter none. I got told off somethin’ serious when I tried eatin’ a guy here though. Think it must just work different for freemen.”

Maybe, Kraglin’s brain provides through its scuzz of caff-induced hyperactivity, Yondu’s speaking metaphorically. It might be a translator issue – Kraglin got injected with the basic model as a brat, so that he could better swindle tourists, but it’s long-since outdated and he doesn’t have the mint for an upgrade.

Yondu speaks lower Kree-cant, a grubby vernacular with too many synonyms. This is just a simple error, a word in his lexicon that’s absent from Kraglin’s. That’s all.

“You ate a guy here?”

“Yeah. Chewed mosta his face off first cause thas only polite, but Charlie got me before I could start on the tasty bits.”

“Only polite,” says Kraglin faintly. Please, _please_ be a translator issue.

Yondu nods, taking a tentative gulp of lukewarm caff. After discovering his pre-emptive nose scrunch ain’t necessary, he downs the rest with more enthusiasm.

“The younger slaves get nightmares sometimes, after someone gets eaten.”

Kraglin feigns surprise.

“Grow outta it pretty quick. But me an’ the other oldies, we jus’ got into the habit of takin’ off the face first. Like I said – only polite.”

Kraglin nods along. Caff bubbles in his gullet. It's frothy and flavored like bile.

“Stakar moved me into Marty’s room after that,” Yondu continues. He sniggers to himself, tongue darting out to catch a drip before it can slide over his chin, staining his little goatee. “I sorta get where he’s coming from. I mean, even if Marty died in the night, I’d break another tooth if I tried!”

Why, why the hell did Kraglin ever get involved in this? He had a chance to walk away. First time Yondu started talking covetously about his eyeballs, he oughta have cut his losses, calmed his cocks, and scarpered.

But the teeth in his lower gum insinuate more than a pay-off. They’re a transaction.

Did his time on the streets teach him nothing? _Never put yourself in the debt of a powerful man._

Stupid. _Stupid!_

Now there’s no escape. He’s gone and bound himself to someone who’s liable to start gnawing on him the moment he shuts his eyes.

Tension winds him tight enough to snap. He cranks straight on his chair, glancing for the exit as unobtrusively as possible.

Yondu finally – _finally –_ twigs that there’s something a tad unusual about Kraglin’s silence. “Uh, am I talkin’ too much about me? Marty says I gotta learn to ask about other folks too.”

Marty’s welcome to him. Kraglin keeps his lips sealed. He tweaks them up in a smile, but it feels as waxy and unreal as this early-morning shift as a whole.

Yondu leans over the table, eyebrows pushed together. “Are ya okay?”

Not really. Suddenly, everyone’s avoidance of Yondu made a helluva lot of sense. Kraglin might’ve even heard a thing or two – _Stakar’s kid, the freaky little piranha… heard what he did to Shagga. Damn disgusting. Oughta have been a trial – desecratin’ a body like that before we could get to the rites._

But rumors abound on board, especially with regards to the bubbly blue mystery who potters after their Admiral. Kraglin wrote it off, just like he wrote off all the rest (Yondu ain’t actually a person, he’s a bot-hooker adapted for killing folks that Stakar won in a bet with the Contraxian madame; Yondu was raised feral by a pack of bilgesnipe; Yondu is Stakar’s lovechild, his catamite, his brother, his pet.)

Now? He ain’t so sure. Every cancer has a root, every rumor a nucleus. Perhaps the crew ain’t so wrong to shun this freak in their midst.

“Kraglin?”

Kraglin glances up. He’s been studying the table so fiercely he’s surprised his glare hasn’t left smoking holes. Yondu blinks up at him. A dent appears in his cheek as he chews it from the inside.

“Did I do somethin’ wrong?”

He’s pretty. _So fucking pretty._ Masculine face, long lashes, crooked little teeth and all. His cheekbones could cut glass and he’s got a jawline that makes Kraglin’s feel regressive in comparison – although like all Hraxians, he can push his inner jaws out if he concentrates, to snap closed a half-foot in front of his face like a goblin shark snaffling prey.

His new teeth itch. He remembers how the Beggar Boss’s rancid finger stumps stroked the bloody divots in his gum.

Will Stakar take them from him, if he goes back on his word?

“Loo break,” he says, and pushes to his feet.

The caff buzz hits Yondu fast. He already looks overly-perky, eyes jittering about the hall, nails tapping the table in a constant peal. His legs bounce erratically and he twitches like he’s staving off flies.

“Kraglin, I don’t feel so – I feel real weird – Kraglin –“ Words fill the gaps in between, but they’re uttered too fast for Kraglin’s translator to pick up on.

“It’s okay,” he says, patting his back. “I won’t be long.”

He will be, but it’s easier to tell a little white lie now than for Yondu to totter after him, shivering from the caff and jabbering ninety kliks per second, asking _what’s wrong_ with those big pink spaniel eyes.

Kraglin don’t do confrontation. Especially not with folks who can fell him with a single whistle.

“Stay here,” he tells him.

Yondu nods. He looks more than a little queasy: eyes screwed shut, knees drawing slowly to his chest. His boots – looser and softer than the usual Ravager fare, to simulate walking around barefoot while offering a little protection – prop on the edge of the seat.

Kraglin tries his damned utmost not to care. But despite everything – despite the fact he intends to lock himself in a loo cubicle and activate the vacuum flush so no one can hear him screaming at the sheer amount of crazy he’s got himself wrapped up in – he can’t help but drop his hand on Yondu’s shoulder. Yondu flinches from it, nostrils flared.

“Hey. It’s just the caff. It’s a little buzz, nothing major. S’what most of us use to come alive in the mornin’. It’ll wear off in a few minutes; you’ll be fine.”

“Wanna stay with you,” Yondu says. His gaze darts anywhere and everywhere. “I can’t sit still, I gotta move, don’t make me sit –“

Kraglin's frown pulls his face tight as a drawstring purse. “Hey now. I ain’t makin’ you do shit. Ya wanna stay moving? Go find Martinex.”

He intends on hunting down Stakar himself, although that’s a conversation he’d rather put off for as long as possible. How will Stakar react to being told Kraglin wants out?

Will it involve pliers?

Perhaps, Kraglin thinks, as Yondu shoots up, launching himself from one foot to the other, eyes shiny as the nebula they watched the night before, it’d be safer to run. Take an M-ship, fly as long and far as he can, before this blows up in his face.

Or before Yondu starts chewing on it.

“Go on,” he says, nudging him towards the door. Yondu spins between the tables, knocking into almost as many as Gef. Nobody tries to mitigate the damage. No chairs tucked in, no outstretched legs retracted. Kraglin spots a couple that actually stretch to trip him. Yondu’s nimble enough to hop them, even as he accidentally sweeps a clattering landslide of cutlery from the washer pile.

“Will I see ya at lunch?” he hollers, like there’s a lightyear between them rather than twenty feet.

“Depends on work,” Kraglin answers, not untruthfully. He intends on assigning himself a lot of it.

Try as he might not to watch Yondu amble away, bouncing off the occasional wall, a seventeen-year-old boy is a seventeen-year-old boy the galaxy over. He grips his pantleg until certain his cocks get the message – _behave, or lose blood flow._

Then he takes his and Yondu’s empty mugs to the collection point, and set off for the bog blocks to work out what the fuck he's supposed to do next.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **As usual, this probably needs a polish. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed it! We're going to have a lot more Marty in upcoming chapters, and we'll finally get this threesome rolling. Sorry I flaked out on answering comments. I have 0 spoons left atm.**


	10. Runaways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Major Warnings for Martinex being a dick.**

First stop after his therapeutic screaming session is the M-ship hangar.

Kraglin weaves through the mechanics, dawdling from one end of the hall to the other. He marvels at the scene: ships reeled down from their ceiling mounts on massive hoists; exploded diagrams that hang mid-air, projected between magnetically-levitating holocrystals.

It all looks so… complex. But then again, he doesn't have to fix the damn things. Just steal one and fly it, far away from here.

Boom, boom, boom. Kraglin's ears wiggle – another of those interesting Hraxian evolutionary traits. What's that?

A misfiring thruster? No, it's approaching.

Footsteps? Surely not. Far too big.

“Shit! Out the way, rookie!”

Kraglin makes two mistakes in quick succession. First, rather than obeying, he glances around for the source of the shout. 

Secondly, when he locates that source, he freezes.

The man storming towards him is a giant. Each limb is thicker than Kraglin’s torso. His head sits dwarfed atop his mammoth shoulders, squashed and strangely cuboid, as if an inexperienced potter patted it into shape.

His eyes pop wide with panic. He windmills, trying to slow himself down, but his lumbering weight carries him on. He bats Kraglin from his path before he squashes him underfoot.

“Hell! Sorry kid – don’t take it personal!”

And off he goes, rapid like he's walking downhill. He staggers to a stop a meter from the far wall. Kraglin, having tumbled ass over Mohawk, scrabbles upright to gawp at him.

“You’re huge!”

Chuckles from the engineers. They pause in their tinkering to watch the pantomime. The big guy chuckles too, rubbing the back of his bald brown head.

“High-gravity dweller. Unfortunately, it means that when I build up my momentum offworld, I find it rather difficult to stop.”

He speaks better than most of the Ravagers Kraglin knows. Way better than Kraglin himself. And despite his size – his shadow spills around Kraglin like an inky lake as he plods over, careful not to lean in case his weight carries him on another juggernautical charge – his smile appears friendly.

Kraglin knows better than to trust that. 

The man halts beside him. Even accounting for perspective, he looks impossibly larger up close.

“What are you doing here, child? I know the men assigned to repairing my fleet.” His eyes narrow, though his smile never falters. “You’re not one of them.”

Sure enough, these ships don't boast Stakar’s understated navy color scheme. They're black, striped like a honey bee in venomous yellow. Kraglin assumed their pilots just had terrible taste, but no. Those are _faction colors._

“ _Your_ fleet,” he repeats. The pieces snap together and the color drains from his face. “You’re Captain Charlie! Uh, Captain Charlie, sir!”

Charlie-27’s chuckle rumbles like distant gunfire. “That I am. But you haven’t answered my question, boy. Who are you?”

Such a nice voice. Mellow and deep. Cosy, almost. Kraglin takes his time in responding to stop himself blurting out the whole story, ugly suspicions and joyriding plots and all.

“I – I’m Kraglin, sir. Kraglin Obfonteri. Hraxian, runnin’ with Stakar’s crew.”

Charlie’s eyebrows rise – then just as quickly return to their convivial upwards crease. “Stakar may’ve mentioned you. You’ve taken Yondu under your wing, haven’t you? That’s a very kind thing to do. That poor boy needs all the socialization he can get.”

Kraglin licks the backs of his new teeth. How much does Stakar confide in his friends? Did he mention how a barely-legal Hraxian brat conned him out of dentist’s fees in exchange for babysitting his prize asset?

He hopes not. Charlie has a summery aura, stolid but warm. Most likely, he wouldn't approve of friendships being bought. If there's one person Kraglin doesn't want to piss off, that guy is twice his height and multiple times his breadth.

“He’s doin’ pretty good,” he says. “We’re eatin’ meals together and stuff.” He recalls Gef’s offer. “Got a party set up too.”

Wait – crap. Charlie's part of the brass. In the part of Kraglin’s brain that hoiks spit gobbits whenever he spies the Nova flag, that makes him _enemy._

He coughs into his fist. “Uh, please don’t mention that one to Stakar sir.”

Charlie can't clap him on the shoulder, not without pancaking him. But as the men around him descend on scorched engine valves and flak-skewered exhaust pipes, multitools glittering and popping in their hands, he pretends to mull over Kraglin’s request before shooting him a wink.

“Your secret’s safe with me, boy. I have no disciplinary authority here – what Stakar’s men get up to is their own business.”

Kraglin sinks back, relieved. He expects to be off ship before the party begins, but in case he runs into Tullk in later life, it's safer not to give the guy any reason to hold a grudge.

“I’ll expect to see more of you then,” Charlie continues, turning heavy as a mill wheel. Judging from his earlier charge, he can move very, very fast when he wants to – so long as he doesn't mind writing off half this hangar as collateral. Despite his affable attitude, all that raw power makes Kraglin’s intestines knot around his liver, pulling taut enough to cut bloodflow.

“What d’you mean, uh, sir?”

“I’ve met Yondu a few times now. He has greed in him, even if it’s hardly been nurtured.” Having labored to turn without crushing anything or setting the galleon off-balance, Charlie isn't going to spin back again. He addresses Kraglin over one shoulder. “If he likes you, he’ll keep you close. If he’s destined for the top, he’ll drag you with him. Just like Stakar did with the rest of us.”

Seems like everybody has his future planned out – himself excluded. Kraglin gulps. “I ain’t quite ready for that level of commitment yet, sir.”

“Ah.” Understanding sweeps over Charlie’s face. He beckons Kraglin around – hopping a tube from a refueling pod and a bunch of hopefully-not-live plasma coils. “Of course. You’re young yet. You want freedom and adventure, correct?”

Kraglin hitches one shoulder higher than the other. He’d settle for the security that if he slept in, his so-called _friend_ wouldn’t start nibbling his nose.

“You want,” Charlie continues, sweeping an arm around the hangar’s busy arc, “to be an M-ship pilot one day. A Ravager ace. To blaze your way across the galaxy, not a tagalong to Yondu’s name.”

Kraglin can roll with that, if it gets him flying lessons. He nods.

“Well. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait. No use taking M-ships for a spin without permission. If you didn’t by some miracle mangle the controls, you’d still undoubtedly misread the nav displays. Luckily, each ship comes with fully-functional tracking beacons. If you ever get lost in the black, we’ll find you.”

His smile hovers above Kraglin, bright and broad and terrifying.

“Let’s not tempt fate, hmm?”

If Kraglin makes himself any smaller, he'll vanish entirely.

“Yessir,” he whispers. Dammit. Onto Plan B.

 

* * *

 

 

“Oh hell,” says Martinex. That just about sums it up.

 _Take the promotion,_ Stakar said.

 _You can do this,_ Stakar said.

_You’ve got everything it takes. You’re smart, you’re fast, you’re deadly. You’ll be a great captain one day._

That's all well and good, in theory. But how's Martinex supposed to concentrate on becoming captain when his roomie perches on the edge of the desk, jabbering ninety-parsecs-to-the-second?

No, not perching. Yondu does not perch.

Yondu _vibrates._ His hands flutter, his legs jig, and his bottom squirms over Martinex’s organized piles of datapads, feet kicking like a kid on a stile.

It's incessant. It's infuriating.

It needs to stop.

Martinex squeezes his stylus until it squeaks. He’s smashed four since accepting Yondu into his quarters. He won't suffer the indignation of comming the quartermaster and demanding a sixth.

There are only so many times you can ‘lose’ a pen before your excuses fall flat. Martinex knows the unranked men have their ideas about where all his AWOL stationary winds up, but he doesn't want to hear them.

“Yondu,” he says – quietly, gently.

Yondu’s blather continues a solid minute before Martinex’s interruption worms to the forefront of his brain. He stops pontificating on the prettiness of his new friend’s eyes (Martinex manages not to be jealous. This Krah-glyn only has one attractive feature, whereas Marty is shiny all over. If this were a competition – which it isn't – the victor is self-evident.)

“Yeah?”

Martinex places his stylus down, with deliberation. The casing sports a new crack, but nothing chronic. He rests his hand on Yondu’s thigh – ostensibly to stop it quivering – and treats his roomie to a warm smile.

“Get the fuck out of my room.”

Yondu’s face falls. “But – but-but-but-but-but-“

“Kraglin told you to come pester me. Conflicting orders. I know. You’ve told me that fifty times now.”

Martinex plans on getting him back for that. That's the joy of being a ranking officer – you have a plethora of tedious jobs at your disposal, ready for the delegation. Kraglin will be lucky to see the outside of a bog block this Standard. Serves him right for thinking he could pull that classic babysitter trick – hype the kid up on caff and sugar and dump them back on their parents.

On cue, Yondu’s leg, tensed to ropes with the effort it takes not to jiggle, begins a tentative little bounce. Like he's hoping Martinex won't notice.

Martinex notices. Martinex notices because, while his desk is sturdy, one leg is _just_ a shaving of a fraction shorter than the rest. He’s planned to fix it since he earned the central stripe on his flame, but there isn't ever enough time.

Especially seeing as whenever Yondu so much at _breathes,_ each of Martinex’s datapads (which store everything from pantry stock lists to specs detailing the progress on Charlie’s armada, who got mired in a Spontaneous Quantum Asteroid Field three cycles back and need approximately three thousand dings hammered out of each ‘Bird’s chassis) jangle against one another like the little gold hoops punched through Yondu’s earlobe.

Martinex squeezes his thigh in warning. Yondu crushes his knees together in an effort to keep them still. But it costs him – he'll have chewed through his cheek if he hasn't already.

This calls for dire measures.

Martinex isn't supposed to do this. Stakar has been very, very clear on that. But right now, he needs to concentrate. Yondu isn't conducive to that. Not with all his twittering, his fidgeting, and that lovely, soft blue skin.

Martinex doesn't need to lick his lips – it's not like diamond chaps. But he wants to, whenever he looks at Yondu.

“Look,” he says, removing his hand before it inches any further up. Stakar had been very clear about _that_ too. “Whose orders are you going to follow?”

Yondu blinks, all that irrepressible energy simmering an inch below the surface. “What d’you mean?”

“Well…” This is unfair. This isn't _mature,_ or _responsible,_ or any of those other things Stakar insists that Martinex be. But playing the _What Would Starhawk Do_ game dooms itself to failure – Stakar delights in being unpredictable. After all, none of them would’ve guessed that when they stormed the slave ring, they’d bring a survivor home.

Martinex thinks of all the datapads waiting forlornly for his attention. Dammit.

“At the end of the day,” he says, swivelling his chair to face Yondu dead on. “My orders outrank Kraglin’s. And I’m telling you to get out of my sight. Got it?”

Yondu’s features crumple on themselves like a star collapsing under its own gravity. Fleshie faces. So expressive. Martinex found them repulsive when he first left the Plutarian colony where he’d been gestated, but they've grown on him, over the years.

Yondu’s holds a particular fascination. As soon as it stops smiling, Martinex wants to make it start again.

Ridiculous.

As Yondu slumps off the desk and trudges to the door, Martinex forces himself to focus. He organizes his pads in three crisp lines. He categorizes them by importance, then by deadline, then – for a change – alphabetical order.

Then he shuffles the whole system and starts again.

The pad he banished Yondu for hardly seems worth it. The silence eats at Martinex far more than Yondu’s prattle, tarnishing his mind as if diamond can rust.

No doubt about it – he won't get anything done. Not until he’s ensured this Kraglin kid won't ever pull a stunt like this again.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Comments = love! Kudos = love! Interaction = love!**

**Author's Note:**

> **Written yesterday/today, so doubtlessly still in need of an edit but eeeh. Comments = <3**


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